- Corridor -

After making her way through the halls to finally reach the main administration room where the elevators are, Amy carefully peeks over the corner to see if there are any guards. Seeing none, she walks silently along the wall, across the room, and finally reaching the elevator door.

A severely ominous feeling hangs in Amy's mind as she presses the down button to call the elevator. Aside from some motion sensors she's had to deposit bullets into, there seems to be very little resistance for her to get here from the control room. It's either that it looks much easier than it really is or she just got lucky.

Just as she's thinking this, her ears pick up the slightest of noises from far behind her and she automatically dives sideways behind a desk near her. She tumbles over and looks back at the elevator door, which she now finds is decorated with 2 nerve pellets right in front of where she was just standing 2 seconds ago.

Amy reaches and pulls out her M9, partially disgusted of the fact she was surprised by some low-level security guard, and raises it to position.

She begins to peek her head forward to see if she can spot the location of the guard, but before she gets there, a metal clank rings off the top of the desk and a metallic cylindrical-shaped device drops to the floor close to her.

Amy leaps over the desk with no hesitation to avoid the effects of an exploding grenade, but as she did this, rounds were flying around her. Amy twists her body in an acrobatic somersault, lands back on the floor, and hurriedly behind another desk. Luckily, none of the rounds hit her, but she quickly realizes when there was no explosion that the grenade was just a blank dud the shooter used to fish her out from behind the desk.

Amy curses at her position. The attacker had the advantage. Amy had no idea where the opponent is while she's as good as an open target. She looks at her watch, which indicated she has about 6 minutes to get to Lucy's cell. The elevator rings off a cheerful ding and a few moments later, the door swings open. Unfortunately from this distance it would be most unwise to make a run for it.

As Amy was formulating her plan, a buzz in her ear took her attention, and a voice came on. "You're getting rusty, Amy. The Amy I used to know would have been able to instantaneously spot a dummy grenade from a real one." Amy had a look of disbelief upon hearing the familiar voice coming from her transmitter. "Too busy stealing money to keep up with your training? What a shame. So much for the Perfect Score."

"Max?" The named shivered through Amy's voice.

"No Amy. It's Mother Teresa." The voice bellowed sarcastically through the transmitter. "It was very careless of you to use a broad-range transmitter. Not too hard to isolate your frequency for someone like me, in case you've forgotten. And thanks to you, our friend Janet is now looking at a Court Marshal and possibly 5 to 10 years of jail time."

"Max! Stop it. Don't you know what you are doing? They have Lucy hidden here, held captive in order to extract information from her." Amy pleads into the transmitter while continually checking around for any signs of Max's location. Her frustration mounts when she notices the elevator door close shut on the other side of the room.

"Well if that's the case, I'm signing up here permanently just to make sure she never sees daylight." Max answers apathetically, after which she fires another couple of shots in the direction of the desk Amy is hidden behind.

Amy clenches her body at the sound of the nerve pellets bouncing off the counter above her. A part of her is reeling from hearing Max's spiteful words. Max was her best friend, one who helped her through many of the harder times through school. And here she is now, firing successive rounds of nerve pellets at her. While not usually lethal, nerve pellets are designed to elicit a brief period of extreme pain as well as potent mental sedation and excessive muscle relaxation in order to effectively subdue a victim. It is not a pleasant process to go through. Max is obviously not shooting to kill, but her using this ammunition indicates she has no qualms about inflicting suffering on her old teammate.

Realizing that she will not get anywhere through rational discussion, Amy rolls her body sideways on the floor and stops when she has a clear view toward the direction of some scaffolding on the far side of the room. Clusters of fluorescent lights being hung by long cords from the ceiling illuminate the room, so the upper part of the scaffolding is unlit. Amy raises her M9 and fires a few random shots towards that direction, hoping to draw a response. It works. Amy sees a figure in the dimness ducking for cover. She fires a few more rounds towards the direction and jumps up and away out of her precarious hiding place. One stray round shatters a fluorescent tube, causing sparks to drop to the floor, another stray breaks a wire holding up another ceiling lamp, causing the lamp to dangle on a single cord and one of the fluorescent tubes inside to blink as if in distress.

Max dives onto one of the metal ramps to avoid the gunfire. As she lands hard, she immediately feels the platform buckling under her weight. It was too late when she tried to stand back up as the hinges snapped and she fell with the platform 15 feet down towards a desk. As she crashes, the combined weight of her and the platform quickly turned the desk into a splintering pile of shattered wood.

Max winces in pain. She quickly assesses for any broken bones. Feeling none, she props herself back up and rushes towards the side of a filing cabinet. She takes long deep breaths as she tries to mentally push away the pain in her aching muscles. She realizes hiding at the scaffolding may not have been the best idea. When they converted this old warehouse into a secret holding facility, it would have been far too unreasonable to expect that the government had the foresight to reinforce some of the worn and rusted beams.

Turning her attention back at the current conflict, Max scans the room for any signs of her old friend. It seems that Amy has found herself a new hiding spot, as there was not nearly enough time for her to return to the elevator and wait for the door to reopen. Unfortunately for Max, the fall made her drop her weapon and it's nowhere to be seen. The situation was definitely a cause for concern.

She knows stepping out would make her a target if Amy's watching her, but she couldn't just stay there helpless with a filing cabinet being the only security. She's gambling on the fact that Amy was just hiding, trying not to be seen, while figuring out how to get into the elevator. She cautiously steps forward; keeping her body low while trying to avoid making any noises, and keeping her eyes wide open as she examines the room for anything that could possibly look like a part of Amy or the weapon she lost.

As she continues to creep along on cat's paws down the side of the room, Max spots her gun on the floor next to one of the office chairs, about 8 feet from where she landed. She begins to quicken her pace towards it, but a voice from behind her stopped her in her tracks.

"Max."

Max's face grimaces in anger as she realizes she is caught. She rolls her jaw in disgust but tries to maintain her cool. Even without looking, she knows Amy has her gun towards her.

"What now, Amy?" Max asks tiredly after straightening her posture. "Knock me out, break out your mentor and lover, and terrorize the world for profit? You want to be the world's first lesbian couple to threaten for world domination?"

"What has made you so angry, Max?" Amy asks with distressed confusion at her former squad leader. "And don't say it's because of my heists because I know you could care less about what I stole from who. Your calling card is your career ambition, but I know, you did so well at the Agency because you loved the chase. You loved the adrenaline rush from tracking down your target as they ran in fear, whoever it was. Sometimes, I even get the feeling you were disappointed when we catch somebody because the chase would be over. When you attacked me just now, it was personal. You wanted to punish me. ...Why?"

Max slowly and deliberately turned around. Her steel eyes met the inquisitive ones as though there were 2 invisible swords clashed in a battle of wills. Max clenched her teeth, resistant to spill the harboring resentment. Finally, words formed in her lips. "...You left us."

Amy didn't reply immediately, but just through those three words, she had a fragment of understanding of what she was trying to say.

"Max..."

"You abandoned us!" Max hisses, as she feels the anger built up from the last few months emerging. "You took all we had worked so hard to get and threw it all in the dumpster like it was fucking garbage!"

"Max, it wasn't about the team. You know that."

"Of course it's about the team!" Max barks back. "We were so close to being the agents we trained so long to be! You fucked up once, and we fixed it... And you go and fuck it all up again, and all because of some girl you were experimenting with! And even after she got what was coming to her, you leave the team anyway to take up where she left off?"

"I love her Max. When I was with her, for the first time in my life, I felt my life had meaning. Why couldn't you see that?"

"All I saw was some flake with Stockholm Syndrome who couldn't keep her knees shut, and who could never be counted on by any of her friends. If you're going to shoot me with that thing, do it now. But I promise you the next time we meet, you are going down."

Amy's eyes narrowed. She put both her hands on the gun to steady her aim. "You want me to shoot, Max? Fine."

Max held her breath as Amy steadied her finger on the trigger. Just as Amy was about to fire, Amy pulled her aim towards the side and pulled the trigger.

Max reflexively turned around as the shell zipped past her shoulder. As if guided by a wire, the shot landed dead center on the down call button of the elevator door, which lit up as it was pressed from the pressure of the blast. The shell shattered into pieces on impact, and Max can see immediately that the shell was empty.

Max turned back quickly, but Amy was gone. Without hesitation, Max runs toward her gun, grabs it, and turns back to scan the room. She peers around, with numerous desks and shelves in the way, there were many places for Amy to hide. She hears the elevator door re-open behind her, but ignores it. She knows Amy is looking for the opportunity to come out before it closes, so Max knew she couldn't hide long.

"Out of ammo on that stun-gun of yours, eh?" Max sneers. There was no response.

The edges of Max's mouth creep up as she notices Amy's backpack protruding from the side of one of the desks near where she fell, fidgeting gently. She steps forward cautiously, not wanting to give Amy any indication that she's been spotted. As she approaches the desk, she peers over, hoping to sneak up behind Amy. But as the rest of the backpack becomes visible, she sees it strapped around a functioning foot massager that had been pulled upright.

"Shit!" Max exclaims, and immediately turns around, just enough to see Amy diving out behind her and running at top speed towards the gaping elevator door.

Max raises her gun towards the opening; at the same time Amy swings her arm out with her SOCOM handgun. Both fire successive blasts at their targets, each not knowing immediately if they've hit. Amy tumbles into the elevator just as it begins to close. Max hears a noise above her, and looks up, but it was too late as she realizes the ceiling lamp that was dangling on one wire had just had its lone remaining wire shot off. There was no time to run, and all she could do was brace her body as the lamp crashes down on her back. The plastic panels and steel-enclosed electrical boxes disintegrates apart from the aluminum frame, and the fluorescent tubes shatter as they all crash over and around her, slamming her body to the floor.

Amy squirms as she adjusts herself on the floor of the elevator. Her face clenches, her free hand immediately clutches the wound on her shoulder. She wasn't hit by the entire nerve pellet, but enough of it caused a deep grazing wound on her shoulder and subsequently turn all the nerves down her upper left side into an overactive mess. Trying to withstand the pain, she pulls herself towards the front of the elevator, reaches up, and presses the 2B button. Soon, she feels the descent as the elevator starts to move. A quick check at her watch shows less than 2 minutes left. Just a couple of security guards remaining in a hallway before reaching Lucy, but she's running out of time. As her mind begins to fog, Amy closes her eyes for a brief rest. Another step to her goal has been achieved, but it's getting harder to think clearly through the unflinching pain and body muscles that seem to be petrifying with each passing second...

- to be continued -